Paul Mayes : Activity

crowdtasking

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:30:43 GMT

One of the most interesting parts of our UKAN-SKILLS Project has been experimenting with crowdtasking (eg Amazon Mechanical Turk) as a way of obtaining small amounts of specialist support. Our final set of focus groups also mentioned several times the potential usefulness of a sustainable location for crowdtasking eLearnng activities (from finding peer evaluation right through to actual paid speculative bidding for learning objects).

Thus we will be listening on March 25, 2009 @ 3:00pm eastern when Ross E. Kimbarovsky (co-founder of crowdSPRING) is interviewed as part of the Ideagora upcoming live interviews . CrowdSPRING's model is not universally popular and the interview should make good listening

Bingo game

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:55:57 GMT

I guess that games like Bulls**t Bingo evolved because of boredom at meetings and a hostility to what was perceived as useless/pretentious jargon.

However we have found that an eLearning bingo activity is a popular icebreaker activity as well as being a useful way of reflecting on terminology at the end of a staff development event. Tag clouds are an excellent way of generating the initial bingo lists and we drew heavily on some of our favourite tag clouds to produce the list at http://lis.tees.ac.uk/ukan/bingo.pdf

I almost ticked off the entire list at York last week

Seasonal wishes to everyone

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 11:33:38 GMT

Best wishes to everyone in the Emerge community

Paul M

(writing the exciting 'user acceptance measurement' section of our Project Report as a break from putting up Xmas decorations......)

Kids' informal learning

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:49:54 GMT

The new US report at http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report contains some interesting discussion topics IMO for projects like ours that work with young people (or child labour as Paul Bailey would call it )

Mechanical Turk

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:47:27 GMT

UKAN-SKILLS is using Amazon Mechanical Turk as a way of crowdsourcing a specialised software task. We would be interested to hear from any other project or Emerge person that has used Mechanical Turk or other 'human intelligence task' services.

Paul M ( paul.mayes@tees.ac.uk )

Blatant promotion for some of our helpers

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:05:41 GMT

This is a picture of a pizza-supported team meeting for some of the excellent young entrepreneurs who have helped with our various projects. They are available (through smartvalley@tees.ac.uk ) at a reasonable rate if you ever quickly need someone to garner user-input for people aged 14-20 (they have access to previously unsurveyed people from all youth 'tribes', genders, educational statuses, social classes ....).

HEA / JISC project announcement

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:54:59 GMT

This news of future funding looks to be interesting to a lot of us. It also seems a very good idea in itself

Crowdsourced help needed

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:42:42 GMT

We would like to make it easier for students and staff to mark up different styles of writing with colour highlighting in Word 2007. Users find it slow to select, pull down etc each time to get to and choose from the highlight colour palette. We can offer a £200 crowdsourcing prize to anyone who can keep the colour palette permanently open (or maybe suggest a sophisticated way of using, say, function keys).

Users did not like the concept of a separate peice of web2.0 software into which the Word document could be put and worked on

UKAN-SKILLS - good progress

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:31:41 GMT

Our Project web site describes the many user-driven strands that have emerged for UKAN-SKILLS. Dave Cormier's demonstration repository (at http://ukanskills.org/) now has its first batch of permission-cleared learning material. These objects will be linked to the online curriculum maps being developed by Janet A. Hale of curriculummapping101.com. Janet has written for us a very useful background paper for us on the US perspective that is now available at http://lis.tees.ac.uk/ukan/mapping.pdf . Another real hit with users is Kay Foster's use of colour coding for different categories of student writing (see more about this in an accompanying Emerge message looking for crowdsourcing help !!)

Skills development conference

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:09:02 GMT

A date for your diary possibly. The University of Teesside will be hosting a conference on 15th October 2008 featuring papers from 4 U&I Projects working in the 'student skills' cluster : ARGOSI, AWESOME Dissertation, SkillClouds and UKAN-SKILLS. It will be free but with an admin fee for delegates who cancel late or do not attend. More details will be posted soon.